Suicide, Creativity, Depression and the Solace of Solitude

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. – Ernest Hemingway (The Garden of Eden)

I’ve been reading Infinite Jest for the last few days, and was saddened to find out that the brilliant author of the book (David Foster Wallace) committed suicide.

I’m not surprised though. For a long time I’ve thought suicide and depression are signs of sensitive intelligent minds. Many online have also speculated that there’s a correlation between high IQs and suicide, as a higher IQ causes the person deal with complex challenges in life.

From my own experience and observations dealing with mentally ill people: when an individual with a higher IQ possesses acute maladaptive emotional sensitivity, it leads them to depression, neurosis and anxiety.

Suicide And The Self

Animals rarely commit suicide. So why do we? Perhaps the cause of our own species suicide is that we are the only creatures aware of our mortality and the responsibility of our survival.

A few hundred years ago, life was different. It was simpler. Our sense of ‘individuality’ was way less than it is now. For instance, if you were born into a carpenter family you had to be a carpenter as well. That’s how it worked.

There wasn’t a decision involved on our part, instead, we were part of groups (families, castes etc.) and had jobs and statuses in society. Marriages were more for convenience than for love, Kings only married into their own blood and if you were born a peasant you could never have the aspiration to be a King, like you can now to become a President. Back then, our stories were already written. All we had to do was act them out.

But slowly, as our society has evolved, and we’ve been given the responsibility for our destinies and futures, we are told that we can become anything we want if we try hard enough. Thus, our lives have become much more troublesome. Freedom can become a burden.

Freedom of choice places the whole blame and regret of failure on the shoulders of the individual. In the old Indian cast system, for example, suicides were almost non-existent. An untouchable never aspired to become a Brahman, rather, he accepted his cast, and his main concern was to find food and shelter. There was no time to worry about depression and suicide.

These days, intelligent people can truly see the magnitude of the scope of possibilities available to them, more than the rest of people around them. This causes them to see through many of the fallacies of society and the meaninglessness of the routine existences and pursuits we all value so dearly.

The Self and Others

When I write of the ‘self’ I refer to our ego, our sense of identity and separateness from everyone else.

With Western ‘Individuation’, we have the gift and curse of ambitions, the pressure of comparing ourselves against each other, and the tension of considering how much we’ve progressed towards our goals of success. Not only that, but with “individuality” comes a stronger sense of who we are, a personality. You can’t be conscious of yourself as a separate individual unless you have another person to compare yourself with.

With this sense of self or ‘identity’ comes a sense of self-worth, which is easily malleable, especially during childhood. Any traumatic experience in our formation years can lead to a maladaptive emotional sensitivity. Children who are highly intelligent when they are young are of often rejected and excluded by other children. Because they are so different and odd, they become social outsiders. Intellectually they are superior but socially they are underdeveloped.

Therefore, as we can see, your social development influences your emotional development which is responsible for your ability to cope with risky or stressful situations. Your emotional development is also influenced by your relationship with your parents as you grew up. Bad experiences or poor relationships lead to greater mistrust and unhappiness in life, and eventually even suicide. Examples of this can be found throughout history.

Hemingway is the perfect example of this, with an unknown number of failed romantic relationships (including four different wives) to fill the void of his unhappiness, that eventually lead to his suicide. John Donne, William Collins, Samuel Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Louis Macneice are all writers who suffered parental turmoil and trauma during their childhood that lead to severe recurrent depression as adults.

Franz Kafka was avoidant in personality and afraid of attachment considering himself to be ‘…disgracefully skinny and weak.’ Edward Lear was separated from his parents and suffered a life long depression as a lonely homosexual adult. Rudyard Kipling was also deprived early on from his parents, leading to neurotic behaviour.

Michelangelo also suffered from periods of depression, writing three hundred poems – many about his mother who died when he was 6 years old.

The Solace of Solitude

Our ‘self’ or ego is not a thing, rather, it is a tension we carry inside. Our identities can only exist as a friction with other people’s identities.

A man in solitude, complete solitude, is a man with no identity. Solitude allows a man to be free from other people, neurotic involvements, historical hangovers from childhood, obligations, duties, emotional demands, fears and hopes. The solitary man also has the freedom to develop intense concentration for the abstract art of creativity.

Isn’t it true that we often feel most ourselves when we are alone? The depressive artist thinks this to be truer, they feel that their innermost being finds its completion. Spurred by depression, these imaginative people create fantasy worlds, to compensate for what was missing and find a sense of worth in their lives, to fill that void they feel inside.

With solitude and intense concentration of creation comes the loss of past and future, all that exists is the present moment. This is the appeal to the depressed intelligent person, to totally immerse themselves with fascination in the present, an escape from all unhappiness and problems, an opportunity to become timeless, selfless, lost in the present of almost non-existence.

Shadow Work Journal:

Go on a journey through the deepest and darkest corners of your psyche. Embrace your inner demons, uncover your hidden gifts, and reach the next level of your spiritual growth. This is deep and powerful work!

Psychiatrist Abraham Maslow put it this way:

We become much more free of other people, which in turn, means that we become much more ourselves, our real selves, our authentic selves, our real identity.

Love gives us glimpses of this feeling, melting the ego boundaries away. It makes us feel that the lover and the beloved should be one, as so often spoken of in poetry.

The depressed artist grows and exists through their creations. Their work and style is constantly changing because they are never satisfied with what they have done. Once one project is finished, another must be started, otherwise the depression renews itself unless they are totally immersed in an act of creation.

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility and worry to equanimity, receptivity and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shifts of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy, which I have analysed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. ~ William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience)

You might also enjoy ...

About Mateo Sol

Mateo Sol is a prominent psychospiritual counselor and mentor whose work has influenced the lives of thousands of people worldwide. Born into a family with a history of drug addiction, schizophrenia, and mental illness, Mateo Sol was taught about the plight of the human condition from a young age. As a spiritual counselor and mentor, Sol’s mission is to help others experience freedom, wholeness, and peace in any stage of life. [Read More]

Support Our Work

We spend hundreds of hours every month writing, editing and managing this website. If you have found any comfort, support or guidance in our work, please consider donating:

How can I end my life when I am already dead inside? Just vessel of loss. A vessel of heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak. Giving becomes an effort in and of itself. I refuse to love anymore. I refuse to hurt. Therefore I have no choice but to die and go thru the motions of life; wake up, work, sleep. My one last chance at a true spiritual deep love has ran from me and I can’t catch her. I have prayed so hard. I have cried too much. I have nothing left.

I’ve thought many times that intelligence can be a burden, particularly the kind that allows insight and the connection of lots of separate bits of knowledge which is especially useful for creativity. That has lead (in my case at least) to many examples of self-sabotage and they have only worsened over the years. People always say, “But you’re so intelligent, how can you keep doing such stupid, destructive things?” I was the wrong person to ask that question.

Having been through a long period of solitude these last few years having lost touch with friends, solitude seems to have chosen me rather than me choosing solitude and for once I feel I’m about to discover something meaningful for the first time in many years via the information here and the sites you’ve linked to (the William Reich website is extremely interesting). So many thanks for that :)

That’s an amazing thing for me to say, tbh, because I have an extremely rational mind, very logical and good at spotting and exposing fallacies in debate. And yet, as I say, I’ve been very naive emotionally. Like most, I haven’t received an emotional education. My parents are very good people but they were emotionally remote – I know that’s because their parents were remote for them. I know that people go through far, far worse things, but it’s amazing the effect that just this distance can have on a child. They loved me and their parents loved them but all were too afraid to say it until much later or until too late.

My parents are also evangelical Christians but even as a child I could never believe it. I would see people born again or overcome by the holy spirit, speak in tongues, prophesy… (I can imagine a few readers will be thinking they know what the bigger problem for me was now ;)) and I would fervently pray to feel the same, a religious experience, to be touched by something divine so that I could stop worrying about it being nonsense and just believe.

Fortunately that never happened, but less fortunately I think the part of me that made that experience impossible also made healing in therapy very difficult. That same sense of struggle I felt wishing god would reveal himself when everyone else seemed to be on such good terms with him, I felt it too when I was trying to use the tools that therapists had given me or I’d looked up myself. It mimicked the other difficulty I mentioned, the burden of intelligence, which I should add itself carries the risk of vanity, the overinflated ego craving attention, just as I craved attention from god and my parents. I could see that the things I was being asked to do in therapy were tricks, ‘hacks’ as people call them now, so I couldn’t believe in them. I didn’t understand how to make even the first step.

I’ve read a lot of this website now and I’m very impressed by it. I’m trying to work out why this has appealed to me. It’s the political aspect I think. I’m sure the creators of this resource understand that better than I do. I can understand in this context to accept some of the statements here as metaphors and when I do the level of insight is uncanny. With the rise of populism I’m very interested in how this can be matched and overcome by political parties that have better intentions than to help those who need it least. The intelligent people on the other side are ruthless, they stop at nothing to divide people to ensure they get their way, no matter how harmful that is. I’m starting to think that some of the things we relied on failed. Science and bringing down the Church was supposed to have helped, but the dangerous people have fled the Church to other institutions. Science itself didn’t fail, it failed to tell a story sufficiently convincing to keep darkness fully at bay.

And that’s what I’ve found here, stories that convince even me. I was going to ask, because of that, why you don’t try to get this information out to more people? But obviously amenability to these concepts depends on the stage people are at in their life and it’s better if they come naturally. So I may only have found a cure for myself, not the world :/

It’s so magical though, the serendipity. I was reading, totally randomly, an brochure from an exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofia in Spain about neoliberalism and it contained a word I didn’t understand so I looked it up. The word was ‘involution’.

Hello to you all, my dear friends. I cant even understand my self and this is oh so fucking thrustrating. I dont know why im constantlly in a war with myself, and why I … look, I just dont know… ANYthing…!!!!!!!!! This is so hard caus all of my life ive been struggling to understand myself and be more concious but there is so much thats going on behinde the scenes and it, the picture just gets bigger and less clear as i grow older. I thought growing older would be great, and that i will finally get all of my answers to my questions and be COMPLETE WITH WHO I AM. That is the thing i want more than anything, to be whole, to be complete, even perfect but as i move forward i understand more and more, that the more complete i am , the more something HUGE , just HUGE is missing. Sometimes i just wanna leave it all behinde and drink lots of pills, take them with some water and never wake up… Waer. vaser. vaser vaser vaser, it makes me laugh saying “wa vasser” in German lol… anyway , look , this is not the most clear note i have ever wrote, and English is not my tongue language , though still the joke vith vasser made me laugh. For a conclusion i just want to say its all so fucking hard when you have oh’ so many thougths in your mind and you cant even express them caus it even doesnt seem logicall to you… lol. This beautiful site, and you beautiful people are so great and nice and protecting, and i am as deep as an endless ocean and this is oh so hard, what do you think i should do? In this moment i am very proud of myself so i dont consider suicide , but my question is: What the fuck can i do if i am THIS MUCH attacked with thoughts , ideas and emotions?????????????? Its just too much to bear… It makes me very happy, and i dont know why. I keep thinkung that if i think harder i will know, but from my expierience in the past, when you think harder , it only gets harder. Suicide is great! but im too afraid of a price that needs to be paid after you die if youre suicidle, and commit suicide plus it makes me really angry that since this spesific article i read my mind opened up. Its scary and exhausting. Thank you all of you beautiful friends, Harel from Israel

This article was like a breath of air to someone that’s oxygen-deprived like a ray of light to someone that’s been a dark prison… Thank you so much for sharing this and helping me to know that I’m not alone.. It’s very comforting to know the just because one can’t function in society as well so many can and do that one is morally bankrupt or just a lazy looser. I have been feeling like that my heart was in a vice… I was just telling my wife that everyone in this world enjoys the work of all the artists and all the various forms but nobody wants to live with an artist…and I totally get that….. Even the artist himself can’t seem to stop making himself miserable so much of the time… Is tricky business being super sensitive in this world

Primary Sidebar

Search:

Search

About Us

Walk the path less traveled

Our names are Aletheia Luna and Mateo Sol and we currently live in Perth, Western Australia.

Our mission is to help others embrace the path of the lone wolf and listen to the soul’s calling. Our goal is to provide a grounded and balanced perspective of spirituality that doesn’t bypass the raw, real, and messy aspects of spiritual growth or psychological development.

We are deeply drawn to exploring and exposing both the light and shadow side of human nature and spirituality. We strive towards integration, balance, wholeness, and embracing both the sacred and wild aspects of being human. Read more.